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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Obama on Track to Have Worst Job Record Since World War II

It’s time to let him goAugust’s abysmally weak job growth proved yet again that President Obama’s economic policies are a miserable failure that will continue to undermine our country until he leaves office.The government’s report that the economy added just a minuscule 96,000 jobs last month came at the end of the Democrats’ defensive national convention, where the president, Bill Clinton and other party luminaries made extravagant claims that things will get better if Mr. Obama is re-elected to a second term.But analysts at the Federal Reserve Board, economists and business leaders say Mr. Obama’s declining economy is not going to get significantly better this year, next year or the year after that, until there are dramatic changes in the nation’s fiscal policies. Changes Obama Democrats refuse to make.The deepening weaknesses in the employment picture also were underscored by revisions in the June and July job numbers, which found 41,000 fewer jobs were created than was reported previously.Not only is the rate of job growth shrinking fast in the fourth year of Mr. Obama’s presidency; the economy’s growth rate also is slowing this year to a snail’s pace: 1.7 percent in the third quarter.But he didn’t say anything about the weak job-creation rate or declining economic growth in his speech last week. Instead, he rattled off a long list of specious claims, taking credit for things for that were not true.He told convention delegates and the nation at large that he had saved the automobile industry and boosted overall manufacturing, too. But auto-industry employment was still 12 percent below pre-recession levels, and employment data show we lost 15,000 manufacturing jobs last month, after a string of previous job losses in that sector.Mr. Obama was playing fast and loose with the facts throughout his speech, as in his statement that “over the last three and a half years, we have focused on righting the ship … creating 4.5 million new jobs.”But the Labor Department says job creation during Mr. Obama’s presidency has been several hundred thousand at best. In fact, “Obama is on track to have the worst jobs record of any president since World War II,” says Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler.Mr. Obama claimed in his convention speech that he’s had to deal with an economic recession that is the worst since the Great Depression. But Ronald Reagan similarly faced a severe recession in which unemployment rose to 10.8 percent in November 1982. (Mr. Obama’s peaked at 10 percent.)Read the full article